At the center of the Bay Area lies an urban city struggling with the woes of many old, great cities in the USA, particularly those in the rust belt: disinvestment, white flight, struggling schools, high crime, massive foreclosures, political and government corruption, and scandals.
Despite these harsh realities, Oakland was named among the five best places in the world to visit in by the New York Times, something we were simultaneously excited about and stunned by. Oaklanders are proud of our heritage, our diversity, our legacy of great musicians, great food, and amazing art, and our truly beautiful city by the bay. Our journey shows why open data matters to a city with big troubles and how something as geeky as public records access supports a positive transformation in our city—for everyone, not just for us geeks.
The Council is a social justice nonprofit that strives to support equity in urban communities and in policies that impact low-income communities, mostly communities of color. A winding road led me to this exceptional organization. I started out as a land surveyor and planner in the private sector, dabbled in IT consulting in London, then landed in public health, working in spatial epidemiology. In the private sector, I got to interface with government in order to access and submit data ranging from suburban plans to large engineering project data and satellite imagery.
Following that, I spent some years in the Western Australian Health Department, where I helped to establish a statewide spatial database to support our workforce and to enable public interfaces into government data. That job demonstrated a great conflict between securing and managing confidential data and supporting easy access to it. Our governments are not just struggling to be open and accessible to the public; they also fail to do this well internally.
At the Urban Strategies Council, we have a long history of supporting data-driven decisions in local government, community engagement, and the nonprofit community. We even have a formal goal to support the democratization of data. Like most other organizations, our presumption was that because people always call us asking for custom maps, we needed to give them the tools to make them too.
